Early Britain eBook

The Low Germans, in the third century after Christ,
occupied in the main the belt of flat country between
the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine. Between
them and the old High German Swabians lay a race intermediate
in tongue and blood, the Franks. The Low Germans
were divided, like most other barbaric races, into
several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes, whose names
are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the
few authorities which remain to us. We must not
expect to find among them the definiteness of modern
civilised nations, but rather such a vagueness as
that which characterised the loose confederacies of
North American Indians or the various shifting peoples
of South Africa. But there are three of their
tribes which stand fairly well marked off from one
another in early history, and which bore, at least,
the chief share in the colonisation of Britain.
These three tribes are the Jutes, the English, and
the Saxons. Closely connected with them, but less
strictly bound in the same family tie, were the Frisians.

The Jutes, the northernmost of the three divisions,
lived in the marshy forests and along the winding
fjords of Jutland, the extreme peninsula of Denmark,
which still preserves their name in our own day.
The English dwelt just to the south, in the heath-clad
neck of the peninsula, which we now call Sleswick.
And the Saxons, a much larger tribe, occupied the
flat continental shore, from the mouth of the Oder
to that of the Rhine. At the period when history
lifts the curtain upon the future Germanic colonists
of Britain, we thus discover them as the inhabitants
of the low-lying lands around the Baltic and the North
Sea, and closely connected with other tribes on either
side, such as the Frisians and the Danes, who still
speak very cognate Low German and Scandinavian languages.

But we have not yet fully grasped the extent of the
relationship between the first Teutonic settlers in
Britain and their continental brethren. Not only
are the true Englishmen of modern England distantly
connected with the Franks, who never to our knowledge
took part in the colonisation of the island at all;
and more closely connected with the Frisians, some
of whom probably accompanied the earliest piratical
hordes; as well as with the Danes, who settled at a
later date in all the northern counties: but
they are also most closely connected of all with those
members of the colonising tribes who did not themselves
bear a share in the settlement, and whose descendants
are still living in Denmark and in various parts of
Germany. The English proper, it is true, seem
to have deserted their old home in Sleswick in a body;
so that, according to Baeda, the Christian historian
of Northumberland, in his time this oldest England
by the shores of the Baltic lay waste and unpeopled,
through the completeness of the exodus. But the
Jutes appear to have migrated in small numbers, while
the larger part of the tribe remained at home in their